Walt Disney Pictures is taking a famous singing nanny’s advice that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. It’s sweetening Mary Poppins, a 37-year-old movie musical about the virtues of cleanliness and proper behavior, with some interactive additions and giving it a revival theater run. In the process,…
While Saturday Night Live freed comedians from the reputations established by USO and radio-show performances, Penn & Teller were taking their craft out of the Doug Henning-dominated ’70s and making sure magic would have a life in a time when making tigers disappear wasn’t “cutting edge” anymore. Though performances on…
Sam Hamm is, relatively speaking, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, meaning he earns his keep penning screenplays without having to subsidize his income by tending bar or waiting tables. He has to his credit a handful of films, some little known (1983’s Never Cry Wolf, his debut), some enormously profitable (1989’s…
This? This wasn’t the norm. This was easy. No big deal, even though he had trained like a sadist for this bout, sparring and running and scrapping until exhaustion. Or that it took a long while to mold a body turned soft from lack of use and “too many enchiladas”…
As pure bang-up adventure, The Mexican is certainly more user-friendly than childish junk like The Way of the Gun, but the attempt to weave adult relationship psychobabble and cultural significance into the action rings utterly false, resulting in whiny gringos in taco-land. Along the road to the explosive conclusion, there…
Im Kwon Taek has long been the best-known Korean director in America; in fact, it would be fair to say that he’s pretty much the only even vaguely known Korean director, and even then his renown is strictly among festivalgoers. The general distribution of his latest film, Chunhyang, should be…
With In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai solidifies his stature as the most subtle and most idiosyncratic of Hong Kong directors. In an industry best known for its accessible, crowd-pleasing comedies and action films, Wong has turned out a series of increasingly risky dramas that make little or no…
In a chat between the two acts of the brand-new musical Fat Freddy’s, Rudy Eastman defused the notion that such bawdy, rollicking material is guaranteed to graze on sold-out houses and fatten his company through the rest of a more adventurous season. The artistic director of Fort Worth’s Jubilee Theatre–who…
Imagine my surprise when I took a seat inside Fort Worth’s Sage & Silo Theatre for a revival of Bent, Martin Sherman’s pioneering if now somewhat quaint 1979 drama about the Nazi persecution of gay men, and watched as a nationally known porn star strolled on-stage. The program insert didn’t…
Al Capone is supposed to have groused that, “When I sell liquor, it’s called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on silver trays on Lake Shore Drive, it’s called hospitality.” He would, no doubt, have enjoyed the fancy airs surrounding the Dallas Museum of Art’s new show, Henry Moore: Sculpting…
When I had the good fortune to travel to Ireland a few years ago, I was almost sent home at the first airport customs checkpoint because of how little money I was carrying. The thought of this happening had never crossed my mind–I’m American for crying out loud! Biggest military…
If nothing else, the addition of The Lone Gunmen to the Fox schedule means–for a few weeks, at least–the subtraction of The X-Files, which has become overbearing and, too often, simply unbearable. (Who among even the most die-hard True Believers doesn’t miss David Duchovny, whose presence brightens up even the…
It was to have been a routine stop on a routine press tour, yet another town in which the actress was to show up, chit and chat with the local media about her movie, then move on–the traveling salesman getting the word out, moving The Product. Denver, Dallas, San Francisco,…
Commencing with titles none too subtly placed over the bosom of a troubled young mother (Russian actress Dina Korzun) and wending its swift way through the generous advances of a lovable lout (Paddy Considine, the one-man goon squad of A Room For Romeo Brass), Last Resort is a film obsessed…
The last full Dallas production of a Suzan-Lori Parks play–not counting the workshop of her The America Play at Dallas Theater Center’s first Big D Festival of the Unexpected in 1993–was Undermain Theatre’s Southwest premiere of the playwright’s first big splash, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. Back in 1992,…
You have just one more weekend to catch I, Patty Diphusa, International Sex Symbol, the world premiere from Our Endeavors that has, not surprisingly, pulled in audience members beyond the typical Dallas stage crowd. The guy who cuts my hair was kicking himself last week when he had to cancel…
Hindsight doesn’t interest Gerald Peters. He didn’t get where he is today by looking back or wrestling with “what ifs.” It’s more in his nature to look forward, to survey his mini-empire of art galleries in Manhattan, Santa Fe, and Dallas, to surround himself with people who take care of…
Blake Ovard couldn’t be more supportive of the Irish and Celtic heritage if he were a shamrock-emblazoned jock strap. For two years now, he and his wife, Anne, have operated Gallery O at 817 Exposition by the skin of their teeth and, ostensibly, with a little green-tinted streak of luck…
Since the advent of television, movie theaters have battled for viewers. Their major strategy has been to manufacture “movie experiences” through weapons such as 3-D glasses, popcorn, Milk Duds, and other ineffable extras that will draw people away from the warm glow of the idiot box. A “no food and…
It’s almost impossible to know what to make of Monkeybone after one viewing; there’s so much going on in this dreamland of stop-motion and computer-generated animation and celebrity cameos that you almost have trouble keeping up with it. Indeed, like a half-remembered dream, the movie’s often so overwhelming that even…
Preview of an upcoming Mavericks game in mid-April as multiple teams, including Dallas, scrap for playoff position: Reunion Arena is absolute bedlam. Everyone stands, looking on with half-crazed, desperate stares. If you didn’t know better, you’d think our fine republic had dissolved at the incapable hands of G.W.–or that it’s…
Looking back, it really wasn’t that good. A little sophomoric, a bit hokey. But that wasn’t the point, and what do I know about it anyway? My qualifications in that area begin and end with a film class I took in college, and I was drunk for a good number…
